This post by Victor Mair on the staggering variation in t...

This post by Victor Mair on the staggering variation in translations of the Daodejing points to something that has been worrying me. I want to go father with my investigations into Daoism — see the relevant tag at the bottom of this post — but I keep running into differences in the various translations that are this extreme or even more so. I’m starting to think that I’m either going to have to abandon my Daoist inquiries … or learn Chinese. The latter being a very daunting thought, especially at my age. (If I’m going to pursue any language with an alphabet other than my own, it probably should be Greek — which I know a bit of — or Hebrew — which I don’t really know at all.)